How are all the cosmetic changes Google is making going to affect the traffic driven from Google search?

It definitely seems like Google is de-emphasizing the straight up search aspect of itself more and more and more. They're going out of their way to direct people AWAY from search with every cosmetic change they make.

That has to be having an impact on people who get a lot of traffic from search... I don't know I don't get any search traffic anymore since Panda took it all away.

Rowtc2, I did nothing at all. My site and my competitor (informational) are not quite right yet. We are unnaturally way off off page 1 for our main KW in US & UK serps. The only comforting thing is I adapted a while ago for long tail traffic over homepage rank because I simply couldn't keep up with aggressive competition.

Mr3putt, you say you added plus 1 about a week ago, and then followed that by saying you removed all adsense except one small block at the bottom, but it's not clear to me if you removed adsense recently (along with adding the plus 1 button), or if you removed it back in april. Could you clarify? Thanks! And congrats! Hope your recovery remains.

--#1 original webpage --#2 cloaked iframe page of #1 --#3 stumbleupon's cloaked page of #5 --#4 original webpage --#5 original webpage (cloaked by #3) --#6 original webpage --#7 one picture, one sentence lifted from and linked to page on website found lower down in serps (this is a newer bookmarking/social media site that's ranking).

Is it even necessary to create our own content now? This serp shows thin pages with one or two sentence and a picture plus fully dup'd pages aren't actually the issue with Panda. Maybe Panda has opened the door to where we just need to cloak "good" pages and whichever domain gives the visitor the overall best experience (time on site, site clicks, pageviews/user, etc.) and does a better job drumming up links and tweets (offer giveaways and network with a large team of bloggers)...winning? This is about.com circa 1999...and it's #winning with Panda 2.x?

I mean wow, that's a whole new opportunity to pull in a thunderstorm of new eyeballs with very, very little effort and then just wrap it all in sidebars and headers promoting my own sites and products.

I'm now seeing some very slight improvements in ranking for certain fat-head terms on google.com. It's too soon to tell if this is resulting in much traffic increase. I doubt it will be too dramatic, but any upward movement is a good sign after the last few months of downward spiral.

I saw a little bit of , not sure I can call it recovery, but had more visitors that the days before. Today it's about half of it, so what gives? You can see in the serch results that a lot of new sites have showed up, mostly scraped site (maybe) and domain names with lots of dashes in the name and page names. Can't figure out what they are doing so I might just go in for a ride as long as it lasts. Might not quit my day job just yet...

So we got hit with the panda update 2.3 and saw rankings drop around July 14th... I know they said the official roll out date was the 18th but pretty sure they rolled it out a few days over the datacenters. Saw some drops to 2nd page for most of our top keywords in pretty competitive areas. Seeing some site ranking now that have never ranked before... anybody got any clues on what we can do to improve once hit by Panda?

I haven't a clue what's going on...on my widget trade site my page views and uniques are yo-yoing all over the place. Monday they were at levels I haven't seen since Panda 2.1, yesterday they were 33% of Monday and the worst day of the month and so far today in my first 10 hours I have already doubled yesterday's uniques and it's already the 2nd highest of the month but with a 50% reduction in average page views!

It is definitely rodeo time for this site yet my B&M sites are looking completely normal.

Trying not to assume I wonder if this site is about to come out of Panda or be smashed again?

Yes, but the thing is, with every update the junk in the SERPs seems to rise not fall.

A few weeks back, I filled out a spam request on one such example -- an unloved exact match domain with broken links, two lines of content and an Adsense block front and centre. I thought google should be aware of the quality sh*t residing at #5 in the SERPS on this major search. After this latest update it's #2! How long before it's #1 and google's embarrassment is complete?!

My wife keeps asking me what we can learn from it and, seriously, I'm thinking I don't think we can. What am I to do... stick some broken links on a page, leave it unloved for 2 or 3 years and then wap some Adsense on it? And, that would make it 'quality'.

My wife keeps asking me what we can learn from it and, seriously, I'm thinking I don't think we can.

Correct, and therein lies the entire problem. I have some sites completely untouched yet I have others using the same parameters which have been stung badly. I have a new site using the same template layout, ads, IP etc with pages all ranking well and in some cases 10 pages ahead of other older sites and pages I have with far better content.

There seems to be no overall generalisation of what does and does not work, assuming one's site is clean and relatively unique, therefore going around changing things just for the sake of it is, IMHO, pointless.

Try launching a couple of new small sites but present the information differently but still for the visitor, not for Google, and see how they fair.

Way fewer blogs are ranking well in the SERPs, and probably not even getting indexed. Google Alerts are reporting a lot fewer blogs, too.

What's up and ranking better are way more ecommerce or sales links in ther SERPs. Google Alerts showing lots more of these pages getting indexed. It looks like you can throw up an ecommerce site for a product listing and get it indexed. I know, many of you will have a different view. I'm just observing the SERPs I'm seeing.

The first algo-change roll-out started already on July, 12. The second one on July, 18/19. It seems that Google is forcing YouTube/Blogspot results in front of other results. While checking some of our phrases I even noticed up to 3 YT results on one single page. This could be an additional push for governmental prosecutors to move forward with lawsuit against Google since this looks like a clear conflict of interest to me.

How about Dani was public enough to get press time. Was is that fact? Or was it a result of their site changes and alterations? If I had one real public situation that made my business look bad, I would add some grease to the squeaky wheel. I'm just saying my trust of Google right now isn't exactly what it once was.

Two of our domains when green again in GA yesterday. Sales this week have been better than last and this is supposed to be the quiet time as the holidays started this week!(well, they started late last week but this is the first full week). As ever I hope they just leave things to settle for a while but I think I know the answer to that one!

Is anyone else seeing a high volume of mis-spelled traffic today? Terms that have been driving steady traffic for many months are suddenly replaced with misspelled versions of the same phrases, and the original, correctly spelled phrases are not driving the same volume.

I mentioned that earlier, and yes, Image Search and Google News are now included as Organic search traffic, not referral. We've seen a drop in referral and an increase in organic, but overall, we're seeing a net increase.

I had a slight burp for one of my keywords this morning. The panda 2.3 update was 2 weeks ago today. It appears that google does 2 updates per month, one big one, one minor one. I could be wrong but hey, it appears that way.